The Sháh Námeh of the Persian Poet Firdausi
Translated and Abridged in Prose and Verse by James Atkinson 1886

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The Shahnameh or Shah-nama (Persian: شاهنامه āhnāmeh "The Book of Kings") is an enormous poetic opus written by the Persian poet Ferdowsi (Firdausi) around 1000 AD and is the national epic of the cultural sphere of Greater Persia. Consisting of some 60,000 verses, the Shahnameh tells the mythical and historical past of (Greater) Iran from the creation of the world until the Islamic conquest of Persia in the 7th century.

The work is of central importance in Persian culture, regarded as a literary masterpiece, and definitive of ethno-national cultural identity of Iran. It is also important to the contemporary adherents of Zoroastrianism, in that it traces the historical links between the beginnings of the religion with the death of the last Zoroastrian ruler of Persia during the Muslim conquest.

Poetry mixed in with standard text can present a problem with ebooks and this was no exception. I've tried to stay as true as possible to the original Atkinson abridgment, so this is never going to look good on a tiny cell-phone screen (small fonts, small margins is the key to success here). Atkinson's footnotes are included (as linked endnotes). And his entire translation of the Story of Sohráb is included at the end of the book (complete with footnotes converted to linked endnotes) as well.

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